


violet wine, lunar libations

by lady_daedalus



Series: il était une fois (opéras féeries) [2]
Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Fairy Tale Elements, Falling In Love, Flowers, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Nagisa family values, Sleepwalking, Slow Burn, Spells & Enchantments, references to both roman mythology and roman catholicism and a bunch of other stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-08 08:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_daedalus/pseuds/lady_daedalus
Summary: “You’re lonely, I can tell,” the spirit said when he wrapped his arms around Shinji’s shoulders. “I’m lonely, too.”Every month, Shinji sleepwalks to meet a spirit who's missing both his family and his full moon halo.





	1. I wandered lonely as a cloud

“You’re lonely, I can tell,” the spirit said when he wrapped his arms around Shinji’s shoulders. “I’m lonely, too.” 

~

Lilith and Adam halving themselves was only an eventuality. In the beginning, they halved the responsibilities of creating the earth. After the planetary explosion that had been their genesis, with each of their hands they compressed the scattered stardust until in Adam’s hand formed the fruit of life, and in Lilith’s the fruit of knowledge. They shaped the foundations of the planets from handfuls of the enveloping murkiness, and when the rest gravitated toward these planetary seeds, the heavens were left clear to hang the stars. With the fruit of life, Adam created the angels to populate the sky, and with the fruit of knowledge, Lilith created man to populate the earth. And at the end of this process, they halved the task of creating the final angel, Tabris, who took human form. They then each doted upon their respective creations and mutually pronounced them good, until Adam halved the fruit of knowledge, thereby making man subservient to angels. 

When, out of anger, Lilith split their body in two, the two of them then split the sky between them, then their children, and finally they split Tabris from his divinity. Adam agreed to give Lilith half of the angels to direct, and they divided the first fourteen, from Sachiel to Armisael, but then they reached an impasse at Tabris. 

An eye for an eye was a simple equation; an eye for a child was much more difficult to negotiate. Adam had taken the last of their seven eyes, Lilith said, so she had a right to the last of the angels. Adam resisted, saying that they were not of equal worth, to which Lilith replied that Adam had taken the sun and left Lilith with the moon, which could only borrow the sun’s light. This compounded with the injustice he had committed against man, she reasoned, must more than compensate for the deficit. During the time that they had yet to reach a consensus, one day while Adam was washing their blood from the eyes he had taken, Lilith planted the remaining half of the fruit of knowledge, and it flowered into a tree. As she had anticipated, when Tabris saw the new tree with its round, green fruit, his curiosity led him to pluck one for himself. 

When he bit into it, the fruit turned to ash in his mouth, and a full moon halo blossomed behind his head. 

When Adam discovered what had happened, Lilith managed to protect Tabris by spiriting him away to the earth, but not before Adam managed to cut off his wings. Heartbroken over the separation from his wings and thus his ability to return to heaven, and over the separation from his siblings altogether, Tabris secluded himself in the sanctuary of a nearby forest. There, he changed his name to Kaworu, for the flowers that adorned his new home, and he refused to drink the elixir of immortality that Lilith continued to provide him from her half of heaven. Over time, his body began to fade, and his halo receded to a dim lunar eclipse. 

~

“Hello, Ikari Shinji. I’ve been waiting for you,” said the spirit. Shinji felt the lightest weight upon his shoulders and around his neck, not nearly strong enough to choke; it felt more like a breeze had come to rest upon him. With Shinji in his embrace like this, the spirit leaned his head against Shinji’s like a lover would.

“I haven’t had any company in so long,” his voice explained. “Nor have I eaten, nor have I been able to move from this place. Would you allow me to accompany you like this?” 

Shinji agreed out of fear, and because the spirit told him it could guide him back to town and out of the forest where he had lost his way. So he carried the spirit home with him. When he arrived there, the other villagers could tell that something was compelling him, but they could not see the creature on his back, and so began a lifetime of whispers that Shinji had been placed under an enchantment in the forest that night. 

After Shinji had shut the door to his house, he somehow managed to also kindle a fire for his houseguest, in case he was the sort who noted the hospitality with which he was greeted and rewarded his hosts accordingly. He assumed his gesture had been received well, because once the fire had acquired a healthy burn, he felt the airy arms around him release. Although there hadn’t been any real pressure there, he felt as one had just been lifted from around his throat so that he could speak at last. He rubbed his hand at his throat and demanded to know the spirit’s name. 

The spirit had corporeal form but was translucent, and the light of the fire by which he now primly stood appeared to engulf him as if he stood instead at the stake. But his expression was placid like a saint when he looked at Shinji and asked, “Why? So that you know what name to call when you exorcise me?” 

In truth, Shinji hadn’t considered it; he had simply asked out of pure indignation, and he didn’t even have time to entertain the notion anyway because the spirit said, “You can’t, in any case. But I’ll still tell you, if you’d like.” 

Shinji said he did, and the spirit answered, “Kaworu.” Then he slowly blinked his big, sad eyes. “Do you think you could give me a surname, though?” 

Shinji asked why. 

“I think it was the full moon that must have brought you to me,” Kaworu said evasively. He looked down at his hands and traced the lines on his right palm with his left thumb. “I’ve heard… that some people believe that on full moon nights, they can see the future. But I’ve never been able to. If I had, I would have known that I was destined to meet you, and then I would have been more patient.” His thumb stopped moving, perhaps so that there was nothing to distract him when he asked, “Do you think so, Ikari Shinji?” 

Shinji clenched his fists and teeth and said no.

“Then how do I know your name? How is it that I know you?” Kaworu’s voice broke when he asked this, and he began to wipe away nonexistent tears with the back of his hand whose lines he’d been tracing. 

Shinji said that Kaworu knew because he had possessed him. 

“I could never,” Kaworu responded as he continued to dry his tears of frustration. He progressed from using the back of his hand to his white, vulnerable-looking wrist. “I had my own free will taken from me; I could never take it from someone else.” 

But, Shinji reminded him, he had just claimed that the two of them had been destined to meet. 

“You could have still told me no when I asked you to carry me.” 

They were silent, and Kaworu did a very good job masking his quiet crying with the vellum-like crackling of the fire. After some time he asked, “Would you trust me if I gave you the last of my free will?” 

Shinji asked how so. 

“If you named me,” Kaworu explained, “I would be yours. Every night on the full moon, I would come home to you, without the need for you to carry me. You would have the power to restore my strength once I gave you the means, and then in addition to that power, you would have mine. And I wouldn’t ask anything else of you in return but to let me stay with you for a while.” 

Shinji said no.

Kaworu said, “I see,” and nodded slowly to himself, as if in a daze. Then he said no more and curled himself by the fire, although he continued to rub his arms as if he were cold. He stayed that way until the vellum crackling noises dimmed down to page turns. 

“You don’t need to do anything to make me leave,” Kaworu said to Shinji, who had stayed awake the entire time to ensure Kaworu didn’t possess him, in the early hours of the morning. Kaworu gazed out the window into the horizon. “There’s still a few hours before the sun washes away your footprints. I can walk in them to get back home.” 

Shinji said that was good. 

Kaworu slowly turned to face him. “Would you at least consider seeing me again during the next full moon?” 

To avoid angering him, Shinji lied and said he would think about it, but how was he to find that place in the forest again? 

Kaworu drifted over to the table where Shinji had left a cup of tea before he’d ventured out and gotten lost. He raked his nails over the back of his arm, and then used his finger to gather up a few drops of blue blood that welled in the wound, which healed before Shinji’s eyes. Then he stirred the tea with his finger, as if mixing a potion, and the already thin blood was quickly diluted. “I’m not allowed to tell anyone the way back, because my mother doesn’t want my father to be able to find me,” he said as he lifted his finger from the solution, keeping it suspended until the last drops fell back into the cup. He then moved to push it toward Shinji, but seemed to think better of it and instead pulled his hand back to hold against his stomach like a wounded animal. “But if you drink that, you’ll be able to find me, and no one will be able to follow you.” 

Shinji said that he didn’t think that seemed like a very good offer. 

Kaworu, to his credit, agreed. “No, I wouldn’t think so, either.” That having been said, he faced the door and then paused uncertainly, perhaps waiting for Shinji to offer some comforting parting words. But he received no such luxury, and at last began to amble back the way they had come. 

Shinji was still unable to sleep. He felt obligated to brave the rest of the night in case Kaworu tried to slip back inside before the sun rose. Then, even though he was exhausted throughout the entire day, the insomnia persisted, and he spent nearly the entirety of the that following night staring at the drink Kaworu had prepared for him, trying to will himself to dispose of it. He couldn’t simply empty it outside, where it could either seep into the ground and infect the flora with whatever curse it bore, or evaporate and make the curse airborne. He eventually took the cup outside and began to walk in the opposite direction of the one in which Kaworu had gone, but he was too tired to travel what he could possibly conceive of as a sufficient distance, and his hands had begun to shake from the sleep deficiency, so he cut his walk short. Upon his return, he placed the cup back in the center of his table where, he told himself, it would stay until the next night, when, after finally obtaining a good night’s sleep, he would surely know what to do with it.

The next night arrived, and Shinji spent the better part of an hour sitting at the table, bracing the cup with one hand and running the index finger of his other around the smooth, glossy lip in hypnotic circles. He recalled the slow, circular motions Kaworu had used when he’d prepared it, and wondered hazily if it had been some sort of mesmerization at work. Then, although he Shinji did not know this, clock struck the fateful hour of midnight, and then finally he took the cup with both hands and drank the contents because, as Kaworu had stated with painful accuracy, Shinji was lonely too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was the 2nd anniversary of my first fic on the 25th and I wanted to write a celebration fic and it grew out of hand so now Crane Wife AU has become the first in a series of fairytale-inspired Kawoshin AUs. Ask me about that series title sometime cause I'm really pleased with myself about it.
> 
> When I was trying to come up with the title for the fic, I found out that the term "lunar libration" was a thing, but I only know about libations so that's what we're going with. 
> 
> As per usual, the chapter title is a shameful, superficial reference to a far superior work, which I am appropriating for my own selfish needs.


	2. I met an angel in the meads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve witnessed truly incredible sights. I’ve seen star nurseries birthing new suns, and gods who collected the lunar dust from the perigee moon to rub on their wings so they could fly, and other gods who would ride the solar winds all the way to the edge of the heliosphere. Once upon a time, I could have made all these flowers blossom for you at will. Looking at me now, how do you think that must feel?”

        "You actually came back for me," said Kaworu in his dream, and it was the first of his messages that had ever gotten through. Ever since the night that Shinji had drunk the potion, his nights had become a cycle of falling into a sort of conscious, but not unpleasant sensory deprivation that was always doomed to end in an extended, uneasy awaking period. All of a sudden, a doleful voice that he knew to be Kaworu's would disturb the warm, dreamy waters in which he lay suspended, as thought it had bubbled out in the last exhale of someone drowning. Though unintelligible, Shinji knew the utterance to be his name, and then he would surface with the faint ripples from Kaworu's call lapping against his sides.

         Even after surfacing, though, he could not fully wake; whatever enchantment that Kaworu had spun around him kept his eyes from opening; it seemed he refused to let Shinji go until he got a response. It was during these stages of sleep that Shinji would be grateful that there was yet water in his ears to act as a buffer between them.

         But sometimes, Kaworu's voice got so close that Shinji thought he could sense him standing over his bed, and even when Kaworu finally did release his hold, Shinji kept his eyes shut a few minutes longer, because he was afraid he would find Kaworu there. He'd heard tell of these things before. As an extra precaution, he'd begun to sleep with the covers over his head, but the tradeoff was that it made it easier to imagine Kaworu's light footfalls treading his floorboards.

         Oh well, Shinji thought when he heard Kaworu say, "I've missed you so much," I suppose he was going to catch me sooner or later; best to face my fear now. Kaworu's voice pushed the water away like a tide, and his breath ushered in a soft breeze that stirred the grass beneath Shinji's head and stirred Shinji himself from his slumber.

         In the darkness, Kaworu's halo was much more prominent. No wonder his waking dreams had been so much milder than the cases he'd known. He turned to lie on his side, with the right side of his face hidden in the grass so he didn't have to look at Kaworu completely. Kaworu, who had been kneeling a few feet away, backed himself away even further.

         "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't sure if it would be better to wake you or not, and I decided to in the end because, well, I didn't think you'd much appreciate me watching you while you slept."

         Shinji didn't acknowledge this; he just gazed blankly at Kaworu's feet and asked, "Are you an angel?"

         Kaworu glowed a bit more brightly at the recognition. "I used to be," he said. "Why?”

         Shinji's kept his expresson neutral when he told him, "It's just that I think I've seen an angel before."

         Kaworu's halo flared up when he inhaled. "Really? That must have been one of my siblings. How could you tell? How did you meet them? Do you remember which one it was? What did they look like? Leliel tends to do most of the human interactions, from what I recall; although she takes a lot of forms so she can be kind of hard to identify. I’d know if you told me, though."

         Shinji turned his uncovered eye downward. "I don't remember," he lied. "It was a long time ago."

         "You must have done something to make them want an audience with you, though. They don't grant those to just anybody. And you haven’t lived that long; I’m sure you could remember."

         Shinji shrugged. "I don't know; I'm not all that interesting."

         Kaworu dimmed again. "You really can't remember anything?" he asked.

         "No."

         "Could you try?"

         Shinji looked back up at him. "Not when you're sitting there staring at me like that. I'll let you know later if I think of something."

         "Oh. Alright then," Kaworu conceded. "Well… at any rate, that just proves that I was supposed to meet you, Ikari Shinji. I..." he shifted about, uncertain, then maneuvered himself so that he was lying down too, looking at Shinji while resting his hands atop his folded forearms. "I can't wait to find out together why that is."

         Shinji reared back from him and pushed himself up to trade in his supine position to claim the sitting one Kaworu had just abandoned. Upon seeing this, Kaworu bolted, deerlike, for cover behind the nearest foliage that was large enough to hide him.

         "I'm sorry," he said. "I just want to be close, but it seems that all I do is make you uncomfortable. But I've been so lonely, Ikari Shinji. You can't even know."

         “You hardly know anything about me,” Shinji said. “For all you know, maybe I could.”

         From behind the brush through which he was peering, Kaworu's eyes narrowed. "No," he said coldly, "You couldn’t. You can’t."

         Shinji decided to issue him a threat – but only a very mild threat, he told himself – by casting his eyes about for the way out of the forest and moving as if he intended to stand. "I didn't come here just so that you could have someone to engage in a one-sided competition," he said. “You might not have any sense of boundaries, but I didn’t think you’d be so hostile.”

         "No," Kaworu interjected, and the brush shivered. "I was going to continue by saying that it won't be so bad now that I have you to talk to. Please don't go." He drifted forward through the leaves and pointed to the grass that lay just beyond a trail of violets, whose scattered growth stretched an imitation milky way across the forest floor. "If it makes you feel better, you can go sit over there and talk to me. I can't cross over there."

         Shinji was half afraid that Kaworu would tear up again like he had the first night when he didn't hesitate to take him up on the offer, but Kaworu at least seemed to learn quickly not to expect too much out of him, and his resting melancholy expression remained unexacerbated.

         "For the record," Shinji said,"I did actually want to see you."

         Kaworu had apparently also recalibrated his expectations to guard against false hope. "Really?" he asked in a measured voice.

         “Because I thought it over, and I decided: even if you had enchanted me, or possessed me, or tricked me into visiting you every month indefinitely, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I think it would make my time on earth pass more quickly.”

         Kaworu nodded. “I can understand that sentiment.”

         “Can you?”

         “I can." Like the first night they had met, Kaworu began to rub his upper arms to stave off a chill that Shinji could only barely feel.

         "Are you cold?" Shinji asked.

         Kaworu gave him a weak smile. "Nervous habit, I'm afraid. Since I haven't conversed with anyone in quite some time. I'm not really sure what you're supposed to do with your hands when you talk to someone. But I've been practicing other things while I was waiting for you, like my pronunciation, because I didn't realize until I heard you talk to me last month how bad mine was."

         "You do kind of..." Shinji held his thumb and forefinger apart and twisted his wrist back and forth a few times. "...bend your vowels a little, I've noticed."

         "But it's better than last time?"

         "Yeah."

         "That's good." Kaworu held his hands in front of his face when he said, "I hope you don't mind, but I practiced by running the things you said to me over and over in my mind and copying from that."

         "Oh."

         "Does that make you uncomfortable?"

         "Ah... I guess I'm more surprised that you remembered all of it."

         "Well, to me you are a hard person to forget," Kaworu said, lowering his hands a little to peek at Shinji from over his fingertips.

         That did make Shinji uncomfortable. "Anyway," he said, "You were saying? You... uh... seem like you probably have a lot of things pent up that you'd like to talk about." 

         Kaworu looked eager to finally be invited to speak, and when he did, Shinji considered that he might have been rehearsing.

         "You know," Kaworu said, "I stopped taking the immortality elixir a long time ago. I shouldn’t have done it; I mostly did it to spite my parents for separating me from my siblings, only now I’m afraid that it’s separated me from them completely. I don’t exist on the same plane as them anymore. I can’t feel their presence. We probably couldn't find each other even if we were looking in the same place."

         "I'm sorry," said Shinji.

         "It's not your fault. But can you see why I was so desperate to see you? Can't you see how I could have been willing to make you carry me home with you? Because if it's not yours, then to whose am I to go? I’m almost certain that I will never go back to heaven. Did you know,” he said, “one year on earth used to be to me as the life cycle of a mayfly to you. But now even fifty years away from heaven is a long time, and… well, since you’re more attuned to this perception of time, I’m sure that you can imagine what forever must seem like to me now.”

         Shinji thought of all the times he’d dreamed of a premature admission to heaven. “I can.” Out of guilt, he willed himself not to flinch when Kaworu crept closer.

         "May I?" he asked.

         "You're fine," Shinji said, and Kaworu reached over, careful to keep to the very edge of his territory when he began to pluck some flowers along the violet border between them. It must be something about his hands, Shinji thought, remembering how he had watched Kaworu prepare his potion last month as he fell into a similar hypnosis watching Kaworu's fingers weave a garland out of the flowers.

         “I’ve witnessed truly incredible sights,” Kaworu said as he worked. “I’ve seen star nurseries birthing new suns, and gods who collected the lunar dust from the perigee moon to rub on their wings so they could fly, and other gods who would ride the solar winds all the way to the edge of the heliosphere. Once upon a time, I could have made all these flowers blossom for you at will. Looking at me now, how do you think that must feel?”

         Shinji didn’t know what to say.

         “As I said, you’re not the only one who knows loneliness.” Kaworu paused to let him sit with the discomfort for a bit before he continued, “I hope that in the near future, I won’t even appear on full moon nights anymore, but until then, if I could just have someone who would spend time with me, I could accept that. What do you think?"

         "I think," Shinji said cautiously, "that that's... very pragmatic of you."

         “I have had a lot of time to myself to think about it, after all. So,” Kaworu said, giving a warmer smile this time, “will you take my mind off things and tell me about yourself?” He stopped weaving, which broke his minor enchantment on Shinji's concentration. “You were right when you said before that I hardly know anything about you, but you could rectify that. Maybe you don’t think so, and maybe you don’t think it means much coming from me, but I find you very interesting.”

         Shinji looked away and busied himself with picking his own bouquet of violets. “I’m sympathetic to your situation. But to be honest, I still don’t trust you.”

         “A not unwise decision,” said Kaworu. “I do suppose that since you’ve done me the courtesy of visiting, the least I could offer is to make it worth your while.” And for the rest of their time together, he wove his violets with his stories of star nurseries and lunar dust and then presented them all to Shinji.

         “I can do this much for you,” he said when the spell began to wear off and Shinji was slipping back into the trance that would take him back home. “Here. To keep away the cold. May I?" he asked again, and held his garland out before him. It had acquired a faint glow.

         "Oh, that's not necessary. I'm not all that cold."

         "I am."

         "And I don't know what to do about that."

         "You could take this and make me feel better," Kaworu said. He pressed the garland up against the invisible barrier between them.

         Shinji was growing too tired to argue, so he acquiesced and bowed his head for Kaworu to place the flowers around his neck.

         "Thank you," Kaworu said.

         The glow and the warmth from the flowers were faint, but they were enough for the occasion.

         ~

         "It hadn't occurred to me before I was trapped here, but the more I think about it, the more I think that I must have been in love my whole life," Kaworu told Shinji the next month when Shinji had again denied Kaworu's request to talk about himself. Kaworu was lying on his side, facing away from Shinji because, Shinji thought, he was overcompensating for his closeness last time. "I know animals tend not to like to make eye contact, so maybe humans are the same?" he had said.

         Shinji was still sitting safely on the opposite side of Kaworu's boundary. "I've never been in love, so I wouldn't know about that kind of thing. How do you know?"

         "Because sometimes if I concentrate, I can get this clear image of somebody who I feel like I was born to meet. I don't know what he looks like, but I know that he's a he, and if I concentrate long enough, I can almost feel his hand in mine, even though I've never met him."

         "That must be nice."

         "It's bittersweet," said Kaworu. "Because I’ve no idea how I could love someone so much who I don’t even know. And I guess I can’t really know if it is love, having no frame of reference, but aside from talking to you, imagining being with him brings me the closest to happiness.” He spread his hand out in front of him, letting the long blades of grass fill the space between his fingers in the absence of another person’s. “The best times are when it's dark out, because it's easier to imagine he's there with me just out of my sight."

         Shinji spent a long time wondering if his next words were too presumptuous. "I hope you're not insinuating that it's me. Because you said the same thing about me when we first met."

         "Oh," Kaworu said. "No, I love having you here, but I did some thinking while you were away, and I think, more than anything, you were probably meant to bring him to me someday. So I just thought that I'd tell you, so that you'd know when you see him."

         "I'll be sure to keep an eye out, then."

         "And anyway," said Kaworu, clenching his fingers around his fistful of grass, "I know you're not him, because another thing I know about him is that he loves me too."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very merry Gay Space Christmas to you, and a happy new year.
> 
> Come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by Keats.


	3. I will not ask a dearer bliss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Isn’t that what faith is, though? The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? I don’t have any gods to believe in, so I believe in him. I want to meet him more than anything.”

“Do you like to pace?” Kaworu asked Shinji after he seemed to have gauged the atmosphere around them calm enough to sit up. He still avoided eye contact for the sake of Shinji’s comfort, opting to sit facing sideways with his legs tucked in.

“I don’t really have an opinion either way,” said Shinji. 

“Do you mind if I pace then? It keeps me from fixating on some of my thoughts too much.” 

Shinji suspected that Kaworu was looking for him to ask what those thoughts were, and he didn’t think they were good enough friends yet for him to indulge that kind of expectation. “You don’t have to ask my permission to do things, you know,” he said. 

Kaworu stood, then immediately sidestepped out of consideration for the nearby firefly whose flight pattern he was blocking. In the end, it chose to rest on his arm anyway. “I just feel like I should be careful around you, since sometimes I wonder if I forced you into these visits.” 

“Then you can go ahead and pace, I guess, if me saying it makes you feel better.” 

“It does, thank you,” said Kaworu, and he started to meander his way along the floral border that encircled him. 

There were certain kinds of ghosts, Shinji had heard, whose attachment to the world was such that they lingered there repeating one day, one sequence, one action in perpetuity. Watching Kaworu made him wonder if the same principle could be applied even to beings whose attachment was to a different world. Shinji observed the way Kaworu, halo dimmed and a trail of fireflies in his wake, wandered and occasionally picked from the pale violet constellations surrounding him, and he thought him an apparition fated to relive former days of gathering star and lunar dust to aid the flight of wings long gone. At first, he was afraid that Kaworu was trying to discreetly break down his perimeter one flower at a time, but then he would blink, and even in the moonlight he could see that the violets had already grown anew. Shinji reached for one himself, and when he did, a firefly flew upward from the grass near his knees to join its brethren who flickered around Kaworu like pet will-o’-the-wisps. 

“Looks like they like you,” said Shinji, but Kaworu seemed too involved in whatever he was thinking about to notice him. 

“Ikari Shinji,” he said at last. 

Shinji cut him off. “You can just use my first name.” 

“Are you sure that it won’t feel too forward?” 

“I mean, we are going to spend a lot of time together.” 

Kaworu looked down at his handful of violets. “Maybe it feels like a lot of time to you. But I appreciate the gesture, nonetheless. Shinji,” he began once more, and his speech stumbled in the absence of the extra syllables.

“Yes?” 

“Would you mind terribly if I spoke a bit more about this person that I love?” 

“You can talk about whatever you like.” Shinji picked the violet he’d been reaching for earlier. It didn’t grow back. To cover up the noise of him springing back in alarm, he quickly asked, “So what other things do you know about him?” 

“It’s not so much things that I know about him,” Kaworu said, and he stopped in his tracks. He looked upward, confusion marring his usual subdued expression, and he tilted his head from side to side as if recovering from a stun. 

“As long as my time with you is limited, I suppose that transparency is best. You probably already suspected from what I said earlier, but when I told you last month that I’d be alright just to have somebody spend time with me until I’m gone, I wasn’t being completely truthful.”

Shinji didn’t like the turn this conversation had taken, which Kaworu appeared to sense — Shinji still hadn’t quite pinned down exactly how much empathy he possessed. 

“You can rest assured that I’m not expecting anything more from your company,” Kaworu said, “and I wasn’t lying about being able to sympathize with your intentions in spending time with me, but…” he suddenly noticed he’d been twisting his violets and began to apologetically separate their stems back out with the gentlest of motions. “I was reevaluating the things I said, and I turn things over in my mind so many times that I feel confident in sharing my conclusion with you: I decided that I could live with you never being able to tell me anything about your meeting with my siblings if you could somehow trade that for the ability to bring me the person I love. It seems these days I’m always thinking about him. I want to meet him more than anything.” 

Shinji squinted at Kaworu’s profile in the dark. “How long have you felt this way?” he asked. “So strongly about it, I mean.” 

“I don’t know,” Kaworu said. “I’ve only had this kind of conviction since meeting you, but I wonder if maybe I just gave up on seeing him a long time ago, and it wasn’t until you made me believe I could that I realized how badly his absence was hurting me.” He reached down to pluck another small row of violets in quick succession to keep himself from standing still and letting the sadness catch up to him. When he stood, he caught himself just as he was about to turn to Shinji, and he quickly turned instead to scan the scenery just behind him, arms full of flowers as if he were looking past his congregation of one for the betrothed who had yet to arrive. 

“It’s not enough,” he said, lowering himself back down to earth from where he’d been standing on tiptoe. “And I feel awful because here I was, waiting all these years for you, and now that you’ve found me my mind immediately jumps to wanting this…” he directed the next words to the violets like he was embarrassed to be saying them. “…soulmate of mine. I wish I could be the kind of selfless person who could say, ‘This is fine; I’m happy with what I have.’ But I’m not that person. I even call him ‘my’ soulmate all of a sudden. I wonder if this sudden onset selfishness has something to do with not being an angel anymore…” 

“Sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about that either,” said Shinji. “I keep saying that, though; I just.… don’t think I’d have any valuable advice for someone like you. I wish I could give you a better response.” 

“I wouldn’t expect you to know,” said Kaworu. He froze. “Apologies. I didn’t mean it that way.” 

“No offense taken. Um, you can just focus on getting all the stuff you want to say out.” 

“Is that so you can keep avoiding having to answer any questions about you?” 

Shinji may not have been able to see Kaworu’s expression, but he knew a wry smile when he heard one. 

“I’m only teasing you,” Kaworu said. “I’m avoiding talking about this next bit myself, actually, because it gets even worse.” 

“Oh. From what I’ve seen of you, I don’t think that your concept of ‘even worse’ would measure up to most other people’s.” 

“You can be the judge of that.” Kaworu looked up to the moon. Perhaps he was hoping to steal for himself a bit of the sun’s secondhand light, and thus its strength in an attempt to spite the moon to which he had been bound. “My greatest fear,” he said, “is that the reason he hasn’t come to me is that he died before we could meet. And then I go down this path of wondering: did he know there was somebody out there waiting for him? Or was it instead that he spent his life waiting for me? What if he died wanting to know why I never appeared? And _then_ I go down another path of wondering: how self-centered must I be to think that his life would have been so much happier with me in it? Why is it so hard for me to imagine that we never met because, even though I’ll always be his, he wasn’t meant to be mine?” 

Shinji felt the urge to occupy himself by pulling the petals off the violet he was still holding, but he stopped when he thought that Kaworu might be able to feel it. “You really believe in soulmates,” he murmured, more to himself than to Kaworu.

“Well,” Kaworu said, “hearing you say it like that, I suppose it’s possible it’s just something I’ve been telling myself because I’ve been alone too long. But haven’t you ever entertained at least once the notion that there could be someone, somewhere out in the world who was destined for you?” 

“Not really.” Shinji shrugged, and then to avoid sounding too cold, he said, “Maybe once upon a time. But if I did, I don’t anymore.” 

“Then I envy you.” Kaworu faded a little, and the firefly that had been resting upon his shoulder had to take flight when it found its perch had suddenly vanished. 

Shinji let his head fall back to observe the moon himself, trying to divine the messages written in the stars that Kaworu could see. He wasn’t able to read anything, but it was a relaxing sight that he’d never really taken the time to admire before. “So how do you expect me to be able to track down this elusive soulmate if he does exist?,” he asked, remapping the constellations in his mind like he could will into existence a sweet someone for Kaworu made from the same stardust.

“I think you’d know if you met him because you know me best.” 

“That’s not really saying much. I just know you best by default.” 

“True.” Kaworu went silent, but not for long. “You look like there’s something else you’d like to say.” 

At this breach in their protocol, Shinji snapped his focus back onto Kaworu just in time to see him avert his eyes from where he’d been looking at Shinji out of his periphery. Out of retaliation, which Shinji would regret when he reflected on this night in the future, Shinji chose a much harsher wording than the one he’d been constructing since the beginning of Kaworu’s story. “Did you ever think that maybe you’re too dependent on him?” 

“You certainly don’t mince words,” Kaworu said to himself in much the same way Shinji had said, “You really believe in soulmates.” “Isn’t that what faith is, though? The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? I don’t have any gods to believe in, so I believe in him.” 

Like a vengeful creator, Shinji let the person he’d been drawing in the stars fall apart and the stars themselves return to their original constellations. “I thought you wanted to let go,” he said. 

“And I just admitted that I wasn’t being straightforward when I said that last time. What’s so wrong with me wanting to put my faith in something too?” 

“People say all the time that there’s a reason for everything. Maybe there’s a reason the gods don’t have anyone to believe in.” Shinji stopped for a moment when he heard his voice had cracked. “You can’t believe in people. It won’t end well. And you especially can’t believe in people who might not even exist.” 

Kaworu went silent again, much longer this time. 

“Well then,” he said, looking around like he’d been stunned again. It pained Shinji to hear that Kaworu’s voice still remained steadier than his. “So that’s the way it is.” Then Kaworu disappeared, and the armful of violets he’d amassed fell to the ground without a sound. 

Shinji fell back to lie facing the sky once more, thinking that maybe he had ended up exorcising Kaworu after all, and at the same time trying to avoid thinking about how that meant that things would just return to how they’d always been. Or maybe one of the angels would put in a good word for him for putting their brother to rest, even if it might not have been the most pleasant of rests. At the very least, they could do him the courtesy of lifting the enchantment on him so that in the future he wouldn’t wake up and discover that he was still sleepwalking to an empty clearing. He closed his eyes and tried to summon the tide that would bear him back home, hoping that Kaworu hadn’t trained it to obey his command alone. 

Then Kaworu’s voice said, “So,” with the same persistence that had pulled Shinji in and beached him on this grassy shore one month ago, “it’s probably for the best in the long run for me to have someone here to keep me grounded.” 

Shinji heard the sound of grass yielding when Kaworu knelt down, likely folding his hands in his lap to maintain his demure façade.

“May I say, though, that trying to wake me from my dream so suddenly might not have been the most tactful way to go about things. If that was supposed to be recompense for my coming on too strongly before, you can stop because we’re even now.” 

Shinji tossed and turned in irritation as he fought to fall back asleep. “Maybe this whole arrangement was a bad idea,” he said. 

“Shinji.” 

“What?” 

“I’ll try my very best to shake off this illusion during the time you’re away. And if I can’t, then I promise I at least won’t bring it up in your presence again if it keeps you here. But,” Kaworu said, “this time, I need you to do me a favor and tell me about yourself so that I don’t think about him so much. Because it’s like I told you; even if none of it turns out to be real, I’ve still been in love for a very long time. Or I told myself that I have been. I don’t know now.” 

“Well, don’t feel too bad about it,” said Shinji. “I really shouldn’t have broken it to you that way. You’ve had a lot more time to live in that world; I haven’t been around nearly as long, so I didn’t have that kind of time to attach myself so… profoundly, I guess, to my ideal person. Sorry. I should’ve taken that into account.” 

“You ought to take care to remember that you also have things to replace those attachments,” said Kaworu. “You can live off of physical nourishment. You don’t, strictly speaking, _need_ other people to get by. But I needed him to keep going. I suspect I will for a while longer.” 

“I don’t blame you.” Shinji said. “But like my elders would say, we all have to wake up sometime.” 

A rustling noise reached Shinji’s ears, the sound of Kaworu gathering the wilting violets back into his arms. “So I’ll wake up. And one day soon you’ll wake up here too, to a me who will be able to say ‘this is enough’ and mean it, and maybe you’ll look at me, and you’ll like me then.” 

“Maybe.” 

“Until that day, though, I truly, truly need you to help me and talk about yourself for bit to distract me.” 

“I have no idea what to talk about. There’s not much to me.” 

“Please,” said Kaworu. He put an unfamiliar force into his next words, Shinji thought that maybe it was all the force he had in him. “Please, I can’t even think about letting him go just yet; I’m not ready.” 

It had been a while since Shinji had felt the pangs of pity. “Alright. You’ll have to prompt me, though.” 

Kaworu went straight for the question that most people did upon introduction: so what do you do? Shinji talked about the minor remedies he sold, because he’d been told that even though he wasn’t as bright as the people who pursued serious medicine, he possessed a sort of nurturing aura that lot of medical students lacked. 

“Really now,” said Kaworu.

“I haven’t been my best around you,” Shinji admitted. 

“To be fair, neither have I,” said Kaworu.

Then Kaworu spent the rest of their hours teasing more and more specific details out of him, breaking his story down to its individual components: what were the ingredients he used, what was the difference between an infusion and a decoction, were dried or fresh herbs more potent, could Shinji please walk him through the step-by-step process of making essential oil. Shinji complied, and as he continued to talk, the frenetic tone with which Kaworu had implored him to speak gradually ebbed away with the invisible tide he controlled.

“Here,” Kaworu said at the end of their visit, his waters and his voice placid once more. He’d used some stalks of the nearby long grass to tie into bundles the violets he’d picked, and then he unloaded them onto Shinji. “After listening to you, I get the impression that these would better serve you than me. A little extra magic for your customers.” 

“Thank you,” said Shinji, managing to catch most of the bundles as Kaworu threw them to him across the barrier. 

“Shinji,” he said, and Shinji didn’t think he’d heard someone say his name in the past few weeks as much as Kaworu had in a handful of hours. 

“Yes?” he asked as he was nodding off, and Kaworu took advantage of the opportunity to ask him one last thing about their hereafter censored topic. 

“I’ll tell you what. Make something with these violets, anything you want. Then distribute it, and see if it draws my soulmate to you. See if there’s anyone who knows me like I believe I know him. If no one does, and you’re alone the next time we meet, I’ll give up for good this person that I’ve told myself I love. Does that sound like a fair arrangement to you?” 

“I think so,” said Shinji before he fell asleep cradling the flowers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...for some reason I have a really hard time getting consistent indentation on these chapters when I copy/paste them from the original document. 
> 
> Come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Oh, come to me in dreams, my love" by Mary Shelley


	4. All things by a law divine in one spirit meet and mingle - why not I with thine?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shinji might have sent Kaworu’s violets away to new homes, but Kaworu himself just seemed all the more determined to remain in Shinji’s.

As wary as Kaworu made him, Shinji possessed enough empathy that he didn’t feel right leaving Kaworu with only painful reminders like the moon for constant company. He may not have been a medic, but even he could see that all the stagnant love Kaworu had inside him was turning rancid with no one to whom he could give it, and Shinji much preferred the idea of sending his violets’ heart-shaped leaves out into the world to trying to bleed the love out of him. Not to mention, a handy side effect of this method kept any blood, literal or metaphorical, off Shinji’s hands. He set the flowers out to dry the first thing in the morning under the moon that, for today, was sharing custody of the sky with the sun, perhaps because they could sense that Kaworu needed their cooperation.

The tone of his dreams shifted that night; maybe the moisture evaporating from the violets was carrying something into the air. Kaworu always seemed to find a way to follow him home with the lightest of footfalls, the lightest of hauntings, the gentlest morning imprisonment; tonight, however, Kaworu’s spell did not submerge him. His sensory deprivation had, overnight, reacted with something in the violets and transmuted into an extra sensory perception. He became conscious when he thought he heard wings fluttering inside the walls of his house, a bird trying to soothe him to sleep by dulling its noise to mimic a moth. His pillowcase smelled like lavender. 

Just on the edge of his heightened consciousness, he felt Kaworu’s inaudible, barefoot steps first on the floor, then pressing down the weight of a chair he’d apparently carried over to stand on, because of course he was too polite to drag it. Then he began to rustle one of the bunches of lavender hanging from the ceiling - he must have been trying to untie it, although that was unusual, because Shinji couldn’t recall drying any lavender recently - and when a few stray buds fell to the ground, Shinji felt the impact of every one. He might not have been able to see, but he knew the sight of Kaworu lowering himself from his tiptoes from what he had seen in the forest, so he was able to match the image to the changes in pressure that the chair put on the floor. 

Kaworu took great pains to intrude as little as possible upon Shinji’s rest, doing his utmost to keep quiet as he shook out an empty pillowcase in which to gingerly knead the lavender stalks to strip them of their buds. He kept the empty stalks in one hand and picked the runaway buds from the floor with the other, so careful that his nails never scraped the boards. 

“Just keep them in the pillowcase; don’t touch any of my jars,” Shinji tried to preemptively warn him, but for all the alterations to his dreams, he still could not wake himself. Kaworu might have still somehow recognized the order, because he crept his way back over to Shinji to sit at his side with the lavender refuse in his lap until morning came and he, and all evidence of his work, dissipated in the sunlight. 

Violet syrup was sweet and brightly colored, so following the principles to which most animals adhered, Shinji rationalized that this product would draw in the most people. He monitored the syrup moment to moment as he stirred it so that he could bring out the most vivid color, and also to ensure that he didn’t accidentally cook the violets. He couldn’t decide if Kaworu’s would be hardier than other flowers because of the magic inside them, or if they would be as delicate as Kaworu came across, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Doubly so since he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of Kaworu placing a curse on him one of these days. After all, he had easy access now because he still walked Shinji’s house at night. 

With each passing night, though, the new sensations Shinji experienced agitated him less and less; it wasn’t that they had dulled, rather that Shinji had adapted to their acquired taste. If he were to be honest with himself, he might have even begun to hunger for them. When he heard the imitation Kaworu grating beeswax at his table, the sound that would have previously scraped now soothed, and Shinji’s image of the wax was so clear that he could calm himself further just by picturing himself rubbing a piece between his fingers like a worry stone. Where once Kaworu’s robes on the floor had dragged, now they whispered with a softness on par with the moth wings that fluttered within Shinji’s walls and the long, pale eyelashes that fluttered against Kaworu’s cheek when he blinked. 

On the day that the last jewel-like vial of the syrup sold, Shinji felt a little sorry to think of Kaworu leaving him for the promise of the wider world. Could he somehow manage to split himself into duplicates for each person who had taken his violets home? Or would he, as he hypothesized, know his soulmate upon first contact, and take up haunting him instead? Shinji took valerian in his tea that night so that his restored dreams might relax him even a fraction as well as Kaworu’s presence had during his periods of conscious rest. He regretted not having any lavender sachets about to tuck beneath his pillow that might aid the cause. 

Shinji might have sent Kaworu’s violets away to new homes, but Kaworu himselfjust seemed all the more determined to remain in Shinji’s. At this point, he’d even made himself at home enough that he felt safe vocalizing. Shinji found himself once again in the liminal space between sleeping and waking when he heard Kaworu’s unearthly accent as he said, “It’s been so rainy as of late.” By now he knew the feeling of Kaworu standing on his chair to inspect the specimens Shinji had strung up to dry. Kaworu ran his finger along one of the bundles, and from the shape of the quiet tremors that traveled along the rafters down to him, Shinji surmised that the bundle likely contained roses. 

“I hope the water doesn’t end up spoiling the oil they’ll eventually go into,” Kaworu said, and stepped down from the chair in the near-floating motion Shinji had come to attribute to him only to settle into the seat proper. “Oh well,” he sighed — his voice lent itself well to sighing — “If nothing else, they’ll make some lovely bouquets for somebody.” Shinji very much liked the clean sounds that followed of shears snipping the ends off another batch of long-stemmed roses.

The next night, Kaworu sounded happier than Shinji had ever heard him in real life. “Really? I’m hurt,” he laughed to a person who wasn’t Shinji; Shinji could tell because he only felt the sound waves from Kaworu’s voice through the wall rather than directly. That was also the way he sensed the noise of a sachet crinkling between Kaworu’s long fingers, the scent of which revealed its contents to be St. John’s Wort. “What’s next?” Kaworu said to the same person. “Lamb’s blood above your door? I bet you couldn’t even do it; you couldn’t kill anything even if you tried. And I’d know the difference between the real thing and you just crushing up the buds from these, so don’t think you could fool me.” 

The person known only to Kaworu said something that was also known only to Kaworu, after which Shinji heard him say, “I never said it was a bad thing.” Their conversation had apparently ended, and the last thing Shinji knew before Kaworu disappeared was him pouring a satiny ribbon of oil into an awaiting jar of flower blossoms. Maybe they were violets. Or roses. 

 

“I always knew you knew my roses were better than yours. Don’t tell me. For someone special?” was the first thing Hikari said when Shinji showed up to her shop asking for long-stemmed roses, and her smile stretched the freckles on her cheeks. “I thought you’ve seemed a lot livelier recently.” 

“Not really like that,” said Shinji.“It’s just that the person they’re for has been sad for a pretty long time, so I thought some flowers might be nice.” 

“That’s so sweet. A good romantic relationship often starts with a good friendship, you know.” 

“I’m not sure we’re even friends, though. I think maybe he thinks we are.” Shinji said this a little bit louder, because Hikari had wandered off to retrieve the roses, and he needed to make sure she got the point. 

“Aha, so it’s a guy,” was the only point it seemed she actually got from it. 

When she returned and Shinji reached for the bouquet, she pulled it back out of his reach again to search his expression for anything telling when she asked,“Is it anyone I know? I’m guessing not, because if it was, I would have heard about it. I don’t mean to brag,” she said (half) jokingly, “but I have a lot of connections, so I’m very knowledgeable about the social scene. Although… you are a very… uh… reticent sort of person, so there is that. Hmmm. Give me a hint.” 

Neither Shinji’s expression nor his words gave her anything to work with. “You just told me not to tell you.” 

“Yeah, but I changed my mind.” 

“Well,” Shinji said, motioning for the roses, “I’ll let you know if I change mine.” 

“Just remember that I heard it here first, so don’t tell anybody else before me,” Hikari said before she handed them over. “I don’t want to hear about this from Asuka a month later. Not that you should feel like you have to rush. But don’t stress about it the other way either!” she called after him as he left. “You’ve got a cute face; he’ll love you in no time.” 

Shinji had wanted to give Kaworu something that he could keep around for a while, and so he had requested the roses in bright primary colors to draw out the best, deepest hues by the time he presented Kaworu the dried flowers. He thanked the powers that be for the sunny weather as he strung them up the same way that Kaworu did in his dreams, right before he would make his way over to sit next to Shinji’s bed and rest his head against the side. 

“Aren’t you uncomfortable like that?” Shinji would have asked him had he been able, and the last time this had happened, Kaworu had uttered a quiet, “No.” 

After this breakthrough, Shinji had tried, and would try, multiple times to communicate again with Kaworu to no avail until, disheartened, he finally dismissed it as a fluke. He told himself that it wasn’t so uncommon; lots of people fooled themselves into believing that the gods personally sent them signs in the pattern of their livestock’s waste or some such. He’d just hoped that actually knowing one personally would have given him special privileges. 

That day that he hung the roses up to dry, he experienced a small burst of hope that the gesture would coax Kaworu closer. He still wasn’t sure to what end, but it didn’t stop him from feeling strangely disappointed when it turned out not to affect anything, anyway. And he panicked if he thought he sensed one of the rose petals falling to the floor in his sleep. But it wasn’t all bad. It only really bothered him when he was awake; while he slept, he found Kaworu’s presence could still calm him now even when he made scratching noises with the pen he used, Shinji assumed (or hoped), to take notes on the various processes for preparing tinctures and the like. He’d have beautiful handwriting, naturally; how could he not? Even if he didn’t know how to write now, once he learned he’d definitely have beautiful handwriting almost immediately. 

Shinji felt heartened when the night of their meeting drew near, and in one of his dreams he heard Kaworu say to someone,“Hmm, I like red. What about you?” and it was so easy to imagine that he was looking up at the roses Shinji had picked out when he said it, and that Shinji was the one to whom he was speaking.

The night of their meeting arrived, and Shinji was so restless that he kept getting up to add more and more valerian to his nighttime tea to make himself fall asleep. He would never actually say it, but he imagined himself saying to Kaworu, “I wouldn’t want to miss this for the world,” just to see what would happen. The roses, which he’d been pleased to see had darkened as planned to a deep crimson, were in a basket he had hooked around his arm because he didn’t want to crush them in his sleep. 

 

Shinji hadn’t even gotten to take them out of the basket, because Kaworu took one look at them and disappeared from sight. It took him much longer than it had last time for him to come back. 

“Did I do something wrong?” Shinji asked quietly when he did. It was a still night tonight, so there was nothing to obstruct them from hearing one another, no matter how soft Kaworu’s voice, or how soft Shinji’s had unconsciously become to match it. 

“You didn’t find him,” said Kaworu, though his head kept shaking back and forth like his body hadn’t quite caught up with what his mind already knew. He backed away from Shinji, wrapping his arms around himself and doubling over like he was going to be sick. “I don’t understand.” 

Shinji looked down at the basket on the ground and suddenly realized that to Kaworu it must have seemed like some kind of weak attempt at a consolation prize. 

“I don’t understand,” Kaworu kept saying. “Being in love isn’t supposed to hurt like this. Shinji, what did I do wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Shinji said every time Kaworu asked. “I don’t know.” 

“You don’t have to say things just to spare my feelings. It wouldn’t be like this if I didn’t do anything wrong, so just do what you did last time and tell me so that I know. What was so bad about loving like I loved him that I can’t have it? You’re the one who told me I have to let him go, so you have to help me end it.” 

“Stop,” Shinji said. “Stop asking me to do everything for you. And stop haunting me if you don’t want me.” 

Kaworu froze. The sound of his breathing that Shinji had come to know, though faint, reached him clearly, but this time it didn’t carry Kaworu’s pacifying aura. For the first time, Shinji thought that he might have had a small taste of the way Kaworu felt, as he now found himself wondering if he had just imagined that aura so often that it had become truth to him. 

“What?” Kaworu asked. 

“I know you’re there,” Shinji said, standing his ground, willing those nights to be real. “Every night I can hear you in my house because you followed me home again.” 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Now you’re the one who’s lying.” 

Kaworu stared at him and unconsciously moved one of his hands over to rub the spot over his heart with his palm like he was trying to soothe an injury. “I hope so,” he said. Then they let the humid, heavy air fill up the space between them. 

Kaworu was the one who stopped it from swallowing them. “Maybe I just don’t remember,” he said, by way of his own consolation prize. 

“Maybe. But I can’t do the remembering for both of us,” was all of Shinji’s reply. In the back of his mind, he was a little surprised that Kaworu hadn’t tried to run from him by fading away again. Drained, he sat down, even though having Kaworu watching over him made him feel uneasy. 

“Hey, Shinji,” Kaworu’s voice said from above him. 

“What?” 

“Do I love you?” 

Shinji wasn’t as surprised at the question as he would have previously thought. Mostly, he just felt fatigued. “That’s not really a question I can answer,” he said. 

“Do you think we could fall in love with each other?” Kaworu pressed. 

“I don’t think that’s how it works.” 

“Because,” Kaworu continued without really listening to Shinji’s answer, “I was just thinking… don’t you think it would stop hurting if we decided to fall in love?” 

“Probably not.”

“But how do you know that?” 

“I don’t know,” Shinji said, and he found himself starting to cry from the frustration of repeating himself. “Stop asking me things I don’t know the answer to. You know that I’ve never been in love.” He saw Kaworu kneeling down as closely as possible to him, and his first reaction was to pick the first thing to hurt Kaworu that came to mind. “And maybe you haven’t either,” he said. 

“Maybe,” Kaworu concurred. “But maybe even pretending to be in love would be better than being alone.” 

Angry that Kaworu had apparently grown past the point of offense in the short time they’d been apart, Shinji took the opposite approach and tried to stymy the crying by holding his breath like a spiteful child threatening to make himself pass out. 

Kaworu only continued to stare. “I’m tired of being alone,” he said, though the way he said it made it sound like an invitation, and Shinji knew then that he hadn’t imagined that gentleness in his voice after all. It dislodged the stifled breath in Shinji’s lungs and the tears in his eyes, and as they rushed out of him it occurred to Shinji that he, like Kaworu, had had something infecting him too that Kaworu was now helping him flush out. He nodded, and he upset the basket of roses when he laid himself across the river of violets to rest his head in Kaworu’s lap. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you ever think about how Kaworu's greatest fear is being alone? Because I do. I think about it. 
> 
> Come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley


	5. The birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You don’t believe in me,” said Kaworu. 
> 
> “I believe in you… in the sense that I believe angels exist.” 
> 
> Kaworu hummed again. “That’s a shame. Because I believe in you. So much.”

At the contact, Kaworu’s halo once again emitted a few lunar flares. His uncertain hands hovered over Shinji’s head, and it might have looked like he was laying a blessing upon him if viewed from afar. Then he placed a cool hand upon Shinji’s back. “Is this alright?” he asked. 

Shinji nodded.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” Kaworu said as he began to rub Shinji’s back the way he’d rubbed at the space above his own heart. His touch was lighter than that, though. “I’m doing this because I know it’s what I’d want someone to do to me.” Then he went quiet, and Shinji liked to imagine that he wasn’t expecting a response so much as he was focusing his aura on ebbing away Shinji’s distress. He even permitted himself to think that Kaworu had familiarized himself with Shinji and the cadence of his thoughts, because as soon as he felt like he needed a distraction from the sound of his own voice, Kaworu began to speak again.

“I do realize in hindsight that asking to find my soulmate was an awfully large burden to place upon one person,” he said. I apologize for that. My sense of perspective is another thing that’s gotten away from me, I think.” 

He stopped talking again, Shinji thought this time because he'd intuited that Shinji was trying to calm down enough to say something.

“It’s alright,” said Shinji at last. “I’d probably be the same way if I were in your position.” 

He imagined Kaworu wearing one of those sad smiles when he heard Kaworu’s voice say, “Is that so? Then I’m glad; I should rather like to be the same as you.” 

“Oh? Why’s that?” 

“It seems to me that you know everything.” 

Shinji scratched at his face so that it wasn’t so obvious he was trying to get rid of his tears. “Not really. I don’t think you’d like me half as much if you actually met some other people.” 

“All the better that I’m not planning on meeting any other people anytime soon, then,” said Kaworu. It sounded to Shinji like he was trying to make his voice cheerful, although it also sounded to Shinji like he was pushing his emotional range. Then he found himself wondering whether Kaworu would be any good at singing. Beautiful people displayed musicality even in their speaking voices, if all the romantic stories were to be believed, and Shinji thought he could hear it in Kaworu’s if he thought about it. He wanted Kaworu to keep talking so he could apply this perspective, and Kaworu didn’t keep him waiting. 

“Still, though,” Kaworu said, “even if you don’t think you know much, I think it would be nice to be like you if only to have the freedom to come and go places as I please like you.” The musical element was definitely there, probably, Shinji thought. “Say, have you ever been to the seashore?” 

“Afraid not,” said Shinji. He suddenly felt self conscious when he realized how clipped all of his responses were. “I told you that my life wasn’t all that interesting,” he added, although once he said it, it occurred to him that that didn’t help things.

Kaworu leaned to the side to invite a passing firefly to rest on the back of his hand, which Shinji knew was likely a façade to let him swipe at a few more tears in privacy. He appreciated it all the same. 

“Well,” Kaworu said, “You have a while to get there yet. And if you ever go, please do tell me all about it. I’ve always wondered. It sounds very romantic.” Shinji looked up at him, and when Kaworu saw that he was ready to talk again, he gently blew the firefly off his wrist, blowing his pretense away with it. “I hope,” he said, “that the natural world doesn’t disappoint you the way that people have.” 

Shinji thought about Kaworu, with his lunar halo and his violets, and he tried to let Kaworu be the sun for once by borrowing his words and reflecting them back at him. “I hope that when you meet some other people, they won’t disappoint you the way that nature has.” 

“That’s very kind of you to say.” 

“Sorry I disappointed you too,” Shinji said. 

“Like I said,that one was my fault.” 

“Also I’m sorry that I cried all over your clothes. Also that I cried.” 

“It’s not like I haven’t,” Kaworu said. 

“You seem like you get over things really quickly, though.” Shinji looked up at Kaworu, and Kaworu looked up at wherever it was that he was gathering his thoughts. 

“I’m not sure that’s it. I think I’m just done with crying for a while because I’ve run out of the energy for that at this point. I’d like to preoccupy myself with something else for a change.” Kaworu deigned to look back down at him. “Especially since you’re here with me now.” 

Shinji wished Kaworu could have looked and sounded happier than that. Then he wished that he wasn’t so selfish. 

“So will you tell me,” Kaworu asked, “what it is that you do when you like someone? I don’t even mean when you’re in love, if you don’t want to pretend after all. But what do you do when you’re, at the least, very fond of someone? Because I’d like to make myself into that person for you. Someday.” 

“I’d have to think about that,” Shinji said. “It’s hard to answer on the spot.” 

“Sorry.” 

“You don’t need to apologize all the time.” 

“Neither do you,” said Kaworu. “I’ll stop if you stop.” 

“Deal,” said Shinji. 

The hand Kaworu had on his back stopped. “As long as we’re making exchanges, could I suggest something else?” 

“Go ahead.” 

“Would you be willing to trade facts about ourselves? I’ll tell you something about me if you tell me something about you.” 

Shinji shrugged as best he could in his current position. “You can try,” he said. 

“I want to know what the angel said to you.” 

“Off limits,” said Shinji without pause. 

“Are you saying that because you don’t know or are you saying that because you don’t want to tell me?” 

“Off limits,” said Shinji. 

“Very well then. You try; maybe it would be better if we started with you.” 

“What’s heaven like?” 

Kaworu wasted no time. “Off limits.” 

“Sorry.” 

“We’re apologizing again?” Kaworu teased. Shinji was relieved to hear that his mood rebounded so quickly, and he tried to keep the goodwill going. 

“Sorry,” he said with a small laugh that he was pleasantly surprised to find wasn’t all that forced. 

“Let’s change the subject.” When Kaworu said this, Shinji dared to imagine him smiling without the sadness. “How about we start small and work our way up.” 

“Okay.” Shinji actually had one at the ready. “I was actually wondering this the other night: what’s your favorite color?” 

“Is this from when you were dreaming about me?” 

Shinji was grateful that Kaworu’s cool temperature was there to ward off any impending flushes. “Not your turn to ask,” he mumbled. 

“Then… to answer your question, I’ve never really thought about it, to be honest. I’m actually not sure I have one, now that you bring it up. But I imagine it’s not violet.” 

“Makes sense.” Shinji wished he had the skill to improvise some longer banter; instead he steeled himself for what he knew was coming next. 

But Kaworu’s voice was actually devoid of any mischief when he repeated, “So is this from when you were dreaming about me?” The light from his halo was too dim for Shinji to make out his expression, but it managed to lay itself out on his shoulders, cutting him out of the dark landscape and sending him to the foreground of his little portrait. The sight of it made Shinji think about how Kaworu would look framed in his windows as he walked through the house, Shinji’s own living icon.

Shinji looked at the roses.

Kaworu kept looking at Shinji. 

“Maybe,” Shinji said. “And that counts as an answer. Do you have a favorite sibling?” 

“No. What sorts of things do I do when you dream about me?” 

“Nothing indecent, if that’s what you’re wondering.” 

“I wasn’t.” 

Shinji didn’t feel the need to stare at the roses anymore. “Of course. Too holy for that.” 

“Naturally.” 

“Uh… so… why violets?” 

“I don’t know, and that counts as an answer. Speaking of which, what did you do with my violets, anyway?” 

Shinji told him about the syrup, to which Kaworu said, “That’s nice.” And the thing was, Shinji thought, he hadn’t just said that as as pleasantry; he seemed to genuinely think that it was nice. So he told Kaworu some more about selling the syrup, and how much people had liked it. What he didn’t tell Kaworu about was his clothing.

While Shinji had been gathering up the dried leaves and blossoms from his windowsill, he’d noticed that the stitching on the hem of one of his sleeves had begun to unravel. He’d reached for his shears to snip the thread away, and when he made the cut, the sound of the shears slicing made him pause. It must have been some kind of foreshadowing to the dream he’d have of Kaworu sitting at his table cutting rose stems, because he felt the sudden compulsion to purloin the nearest violet and tuck it into the open seam in his sleeve. As his hand obeyed, his thoughts turned once again to the possibility of angelic possession. That didn’t stop him from going one step further and crushing another violet against his inner wrist, at the spot where one might apply a few drops of perfume, and where his veins ran blue and violet beneath his skin. He’d held his wrist to his nose afterward, but it hadn’t smelled like anything.

Shinji sneaked a glance at the seam on his sleeve that he still hadn’t fixed. To his relief, the violet he’d hidden there, now ground down to nothing more than a coarse powder, kept Shinji’s secret and emitted none of its living brethren’s glow. 

“Speaking of flowers,” said Kaworu, “I never thanked you for the roses. That was very rude of me.” He reached over to capture one of them between his long fingers, then held it up to his face with a curious expression.

“Do you not like them?” asked Shinji. “You seem concerned.” 

The rose Kaworu held pulsed with light for a moment, and the outermost petals blossomed back to their original color and shape before the light winked out, and their vitality with it. Kaworu sighed. “You went through all the trouble of bringing me flowers and I can’t even keep them fresh.” 

“Oh,” said Shinji, “No, they’re supposed to be like that. They’re dried. I did that so you’d have some other flowers to look at without worrying about them wilting.” 

“I see. Thank you.” Kaworu gathered the roses together to the best of his ability, but Shinji thought he still looked disheartened. 

“Hey, Kaworu?” 

“Yes?” Kaworu said as he gave the stems an apologetic stroke. 

“Is it alright if I ask you something?” 

Kaworu hummed an approval. Shinji still couldn’t quite tell if it sounded like singing. He knew that breathing was very important for singers. Did Kaworu even really breathe? Maybe not, Shinji thought, thinking back to his blue blood. 

“How were you able to tell that I was lonely?”

“Like attracts like, I suppose. Or maybe I’m just very desperate and good at guessing. But,” he said, “If I may say so, I really do feel like I know you somehow.” 

“Is that your way of trying to ask me about the angel again?” 

“No, if you can believe that,” said Kaworu. “I’ve figured out by now that I haven’t earned that privilege yet.” 

“And also I don’t remember it anyway.”

“But of course.” 

“So now you really can’t ask me about it.” 

Kaworu pushed Shinji’s bangs back affectionately. “Quite understood. I’m not out to hurt you, you know.” 

“Well, that’s nice,” Shinji said, not with nearly as much sincerity as Kaworu had said it before. 

Kaworu looked puzzled. “Something the matter?” 

“I mean that it’s a nice thing to say — ” Shinji got distracted when Kaworu’s hand ran over his bangs again, “ — I’m just saying that it’s not like you can promise you won’t in the future.”

“You don’t believe in me,” said Kaworu. 

“I believe in you… in the sense that I believe angels exist.” 

Kaworu hummed again. “That’s a shame. Because I believe in you. So much.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you miss me? 
> 
> Title is a reference to "A Birthday" by Christina Rossetti.


	6. My soul this hour has drawn your soul a little nearer yet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That night’s dream slipped underneath his door, unfolded itself, and floated over to Shinji on papery wings that it gently beat against his forehead to fan away the haze of unconsciousness. Then, as Shinji was stirring, it flew a bit further to light upon his chest and sink into his heart. Shinji felt it fluttering there when he opened his eyes to see that Kaworu had not left him.

“You have blue blood,” was something that slipped out from Shinji’s subconscious when he began to fall back asleep. It seemed to him like his visit with Kaworu was shorter this time around. He blamed it on Kaworu’s fingers in his hair, probably working a sleep spell into his mind. 

“I do,” said Kaworu. “But why was that on your mind?” 

“On Earth, blue blood is supposed to mean royalty,” said Shinji. “Are you royalty? Or whatever the angel version of royalty is, anyway.” 

Kaworu stopped massaging Shinji’s scalp so that he could take Shinji’s face in both his hands. “Off limits,” he said. 

“Oh.” 

“I’ll cut you another deal, though, since you’ve put me in such a good mood,” said Kaworu, leaning over him. He was close enough that had he any breath, the feeling of it would have startled Shinji’s eyelids back open. Then he tapped his pointer finger to Shinji’s nose, gently enough that that would not awaken Shinji either. “I wasn’t born ‘Kaworu.’ You have until the next full moon to guess my true name. When next we meet, I’ll give you one chance to tell me what it is. Guess correctly, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Anything?”

“Anything,” Kaworu confirmed. “I’ll open my heart to you and ask nothing of you in return.” 

Shinji laughed. “Do angels even have hearts though?” 

“Technically not,” said Kaworu. “But then again, I’m technically not an angel anymore.” 

“Because you don’t have your wings anymore?” 

“Know my name, and you’ll know that too.” 

Now that Shinji could feel himself slipping out of Kaworu’s grasp, he felt bold enough to say, “Just so I can be sure, swear on something other than your heart that you’ll keep your promise.” 

It seemed that Shinji wasn’t the only one feeling bold, because Kaworu leaned down even further and stopped just short of sealing their agreement with a kiss. “I swear it,” he said above Shinji’s lips, “on my missing wings.” 

He pulled himself back before Shinji opened his eyes to say, “One more thing.” 

“Yes?” 

“Can I have some more of your violets?” 

Kaworu seemed surprised, though not unpleasantly so, and he complied. “Are you hoping they’ll tell you something in the way of a hint?” he asked, tucking a small bunch into the buttonhole of Shinji’s lapel. 

“That’s for me to know,” said Shinji. 

“I see.” Kaworu picked a few more violets and slipped them behind Shinji’s ear one by one. Starting with the second violet, Shinji noticed that he was beginning to sink incrementally back into unconsciousness.

“If that’s the case, I very much hope that they work,” said Kaworu as he tucked the third into its place. “I do want you to win our little bargain.” He managed to fit one last violet in with the parting words, “Prove to me that you know me, Ikari Shinji. I believe in you.”

Shinji thought he heard Kaworu gathering the roses into his arms before the two of them drifted away from one another. 

When he woke up, the first thing Shinji did with his newly regained consciousness was to cut open all the seams on his clothing and sew the violets inside before he had to watch them wilt. 

 

“What’s wrong?” Hikari asked when Shinji came to her again, claiming that he just wanted to spend some time with someone else (“You’ve become so much more social lately. I like it,” Hikari had said.) “Are you in love?” 

“Not that I know of,” said Shinji. 

“Well, that’s progress from the last time you were over, anyway. So did your not-friend like the roses?” 

“I think?” 

“Ah, Shinji,” Hikari said, touching her finger to the tip of Shinji’s nose from where she was sitting across the table, “My hope for you is that one day you won’t have to qualify everything with ‘I think.’” 

“Why does everybody want to touch my nose?” Shinji asked, guiding her finger aside with his own. 

“Because you have a cute little button nose.”

“Touji better not hear you calling me cute all the time.” 

“Twice is not all the time. Hey,” she said, perking up, “So are you telling me that this not-friend of yours also thinks your nose is cute?”

“I don’t know.” 

“I think you know. And it doesn’t matter if you tell me anyway, because I’m going to find out who it is and ask him personally.” 

“Good luck with that.” 

“Thanks.” Hikari winked at him, but then her eye caught that Shinji had started white-knuckling his knees at some point during their conversation. “Something the matter?” 

“Nothing.” 

The theater had never been Shinji’s calling, and multiple people had told him as much over the years. “Doesn’t look like nothing,” said Hikari. “You have an upset stomach or something? I knew I shouldn’t have let Touji make the tea, only I didn’t think that was something he could mess up…” 

“It’s just that I didn’t come here to be harangued about my relationship status,” Shinji blurted. 

Hikari looked taken aback, although not as taken aback as Shinji would have liked, if he were being honest with himself. 

“Because,” he said, hoping to rectify that, “there’s more to a person than whether they’re in love or not. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I just wanted some friends?” 

“Well, yes,” said Hikari, still unruffled. “This is the kind of thing a lot of friends talk about. Did it ever occur to _you_ that if you didn’t like it, you could have just said so?” 

“I mean,” Shinji said, rubbing his hands together to unclench them, “kind of, I guess.” 

Hikari flicked his nose. “Someday you will have more conviction. Don’t worry; all you need to do is hang out with me some more. This I promise you,” she said in a facetious, lofty manner. “I’m a very good influence, unlike some people.” Then she coughed a cough that sounded an awful lot like “Soryuu.” 

 

“Have you heard of a lunar infusion?” Kaworu’s voice asked him in his dream that night. Shinji knew he was being a little presumptuous, inserting himself into Kaworu’s conversation like this, but he wanted to believe that it was he to whom Kaworu was speaking until it was proven otherwise. The warmth of the violets in his sleeve told him that Kaworu was feeling content, and the floorboards told him that Kaworu was tracing circles on them with the toes of his bare feet. 

_It sounds familiar,_ Shinji thought at him during the pause where he waited for a reply. 

“I just heard of it recently. It’s when you leave your tea out to steep in the moonlight. It’s supposed to give the tea a… I don’t know, a more magical kind of taste or something.” Small displacements that Shinji could feel in the air indicated that Kaworu was waving his fingers to convey “magical.” Kaworu had long fingers. Shinji had seen them himself, and they were very aesthetically pleasing. “I’m not too interested in trying it, for obvious reasons. But I was thinking that maybe you would like it, just to try something new. Would you like me to set some out for you now?” 

When the rim of the teacup hit the table, Shinji knew that it was the same one Kaworu had used to prepare the potion that brought them together. After he’d drained it, to that day Shinji had never touched it again because… 

“I can’t use that one,” he said aloud. “That one’s yours now.” 

He sat up, opened his eyes, and saw Kaworu sitting there. He looked adoringly at his invisible partner, and he looked exactly like Shinji had pictured him. 

“Maybe with some of the lavender blossoms?” Kaworu suggested, either unable to hear or ignoring Shinji’s words. It didn’t help Shinji’s anxiety that he was talking to somebody else. 

“Kaworu,” Shinji called. “Kaworu, I’m here. Can you hear me?” 

Kaworu stood up from the chair, and when he stepped back into the light of the fireplace, Shinji could see that he was missing his halo. “I’ll go get some,” he said.

Shinji panicked when he saw him striding to the door, because he felt, as surely as Kaworu had felt his loneliness, that once Kaworu stepped outside, he would not come back. 

“Kaworu,” he called again, his legs tangling in the sheets as he scrambled to follow him. “Wait for me.” 

Kaworu got to the door first, evaporating in the weak morning light. Shinji blinked and found he was properly awake now, standing in the grass outside his house, feet wet with dew that, like Kaworu, would soon be pulled back up into the sky. 

 

“Do you ever see things right before you wake up?” 

“Yeah,” said Hikari. 

“Really?” 

“Yeah. Hold that thought,” she said, holding up a finger. They were crouched in her garden together, watching the bee bath that Hikari had just refreshed from a nonthreatening distance. She pointed to an especially fat bee that had meandered its way over to the edge. “That’s the one I was telling you about. Touji Jr.” 

“You’re so mean to him sometimes.” 

“It’s nothing he can’t handle. Besides, I told Touji about Touji Jr. and Touji likes Touji Jr. too, so there.” 

“Do you name all of them?” 

“I have a couple other names, but I’m not good enough at telling if it’s the same bee or not to use them regularly.” 

“Can I name one?” 

Hikari shrugged. “Knock yourself out.” 

“The next one that comes over,” said Shinji, “I want to name it Sachiel.” 

“That’s a pretty big name for a bee. Where’d you even come up with that?” 

“I dunno; it’s just something I heard somewhere.” 

“I like it,” Hikari said, nodding her head rhythmically like she was running over the sound of it in her mind. “It’s very… um, meretricious.” 

“I _do_ know what that means, for your information.” 

“Anyway,” said Hikari before he could call her out further, “to answer your question, I don’t really anymore, but when I was little I used to hear my younger sisters whispering stuff to me right before I woke up. And I thought they were trying to scare me, so I’d try to tell them off, but I couldn’t move.” 

“Sounds unsettling.” 

“It was. But I guess that’s not really the same as what you were asking about, since I didn’t see anything. I’m guessing you do, though, since you brought it up?” 

“Yeah. Sometimes before I wake up, I see somebody in my house. Only it’s not a scary kind of thing; it actually feels really peaceful having them around, and I only get anxious when I feel like they’re leaving.” 

Another bee crawled onto the lip of the bee bath, and Shinji immediately claimed it as his. “That one gets to be Sachiel now.” 

“That’s only Sachiel the _First_ ,” said Hikari. “You don’t know if you’ll be able to recognize it next time. I made that mistake before, and I went up to Preston the Eighth before I finally called it quits and decided to just stick to ones I could recognize. Touji Jr. never disappoints.” 

“Good for Touji Jr.” 

“Yes, good for Touji Jr.” 

Touji Jr. tried to venture onto the unexplored underside of the bath, but fell off it completely in the process. 

“Loser,” said Hikari. “I love him.” 

In the spirit of Touji Jr., Shinji thought he’d also try his hand at breaching some new territory conversationally. “So, um, back to what I was saying before.” 

Hikari was watching her apian charge do a bee’s approximation of a waddle on the ground, but she told Shinji, “Don’t worry; I’m still listening.” 

“You know how there’s some people who are afraid to fall asleep?” 

“Um,” Hikari paused for a good long while. “Uh,” she said,“Yeah. I do, actually.” 

“Oh, really?” 

“Mm-hm. Uh. That’s not really here or there, though.” _Off limits,_ Shinji imagined Kaworu saying to him in the newly clear voice that he’d possessed in Shinji’s latest dream. He’d probably tap him on the nose while he was at it. 

“Well, the thing is that sometimes,” Shinji said, “because the things I see are so pleasant rather than the really unsettling stuff a lot of other people get, I’m afraid to wake up.” 

 

That night’s dream slipped underneath his door, unfolded itself, and floated over to Shinji on papery wings that it gently beat against his forehead to fan away the haze of unconsciousness. Then, as Shinji was stirring, it flew a bit further to light upon his chest and sink into his heart. Shinji felt it fluttering there when he opened his eyes to see that Kaworu had not left him. 

“I missed you,” he said. 

Kaworu was facing him, but looking past him at something on the wall. For the first time, Shinji could make out the exact color of his eyes. He stood to get a closer look. 

“What are you looking for?” he asked. “Tell me and you won’t need to look anymore; I’ll do it for you.” 

When he reached out to touch Kaworu, he half expected to pass through him, but a thin, invisible barrier stopped his hand from meeting Kaworu’s skin completely. He traced it along Kaworu’s shoulder, the sensation of skimming his fingers over it was like storm static repelling him. Because the crown of Kaworu’s halo was absent, Shinji felt that this must be another manifestation of the angelic nature that Kaworu would never quite scrub out of himself. Blue blood and clouds in his lungs that generated electricity on his skin. Shinji remembered how Kaworu had felt like nothing at all when Shinji had carried him home. Even now, Shinji thought, if he were able to pick Kaworu up in his current state, Kaworu would still be light like a bird. 

“So that’s where it was,” Shinji heard Kaworu said to himself. Without speaking further or giving anything that indicated that he was happy with his answer, Kaworu turned away, crossed the room, and settled at the window, resting his elbows on the sill. 

“Nevermind,” Shinji wanted to say, “It looks like you found it, then.”

However, his voice didn’t even make it past its chest. The thing that was sitting in his heart now neutralized his speech with the unceasing beating of its wings. 

“Kaworu?” he tried. He failed. He tried several more times in quick succession, but that only made the thing in his heart beat its wings faster, and his heart had to beat faster to keep up. He struck his chest with the heel of his palm, trying to dislodge it to no avail, and he only stopped because he thought that Kaworu wouldn’t want him to hurt himself. 

Frustrated, he stumbled over to stand behind Kaworu and leaned against him, the motion just short of collapsing. “Kaworu, I feel sick; please answer me,” he mouthed, the side of his face resting in the static that shrouded Kaworu’s back. He brought both his hands up to rest there too, and he let himself be numbed. “Hey, Kaworu, what are you doing to me?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Insomnia" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.


	7. Let me sleep through his blinding reign, and only wake with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Even if you love him only a fraction of the way that I know he must adore you, that will be enough for him.”

When Shinji woke up, he was sitting with his back to the wall on whose windowsill Kaworu had been leaning. He felt tired, and was concerned that only a few nights had been enough to make him nostalgic for the days when Kaworu’s dreams left him feeling fuller. He was even more concerned thinking that maybe it would also be a few nights’ time before he’d be feeling nostalgic for the day he’d told Hikari that he was afraid to wake up. He managed to stand up by walking his way up the wall with his hands, and he stretched his sore joints out just so that he could make his way over to his bed and lie down again. 

He rolled over so that he was looking up at the ceiling with both his hands resting over his heart, checking for any irregularities while he occupied his eyes with tracing constellations in the plaster. He’d hoped that maybe the violets in his sleeve could help him recreate the sky on the night he’d last met Kaworu, because maybe that way he could manage to read Kaworu’s real name in the stars. Nothing of the sort happened, though, and neither could he feel any residual tremors left over from the thing in his chest the night before. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure that it had hurt; it had mostly felt strange. 

He tried saying Kaworu’s name aloud, and it went without hitch in either his speech or his heartbeat. A memory of the way Kaworu had rubbed his hand over the skin above his potential heart cut its way through Shinji’s stream of consciousness. From there it slipped from his stream of consciousness into his bloodstream to become a phantom muscle memory, and his fingers began to trace imitation patterns over his own skin. He stayed lying down like that until the sunlight that had been creeping across his floor made its way to his eyes. 

However, his fingers hadn’t yet worn out all the forms they needed to trace. They kept writing what felt like alien characters on whatever surface Shinji rested them whenever he he had an idle moment. Even when he didn’t have an idle moment, they struggled to return to their task and caused Shinji at one point to drop and break one of his vials when he was bottling some tinctures. He considered it a small miracle in itself that he didn’t prick any of his fingers as he picked up the shards. Well, he thought, maybe Kaworu had been one of those guardian angels.

After he’d finished cleaning up the mess, he lifted his head to see a new stain on his wall. It wasn’t anything severe, just a slight discoloration, and it was small enough to cover with his thumb. By now, though, he knew better than to assume it was something he just hadn’t noticed before. He put his hand to it, but he didn’t feel anything odd, just like he hadn’t felt anything amiss when he’d examined his chest that morning. Maybe Kaworu would have something to say about it that night, he thought.

When night fell, Shinji discovered that the creature occupying his heart was nocturnal. Its stirring inside him brought him to consciousness before any of the new noises in his house could. The wings in his walls, which over the nights had created a comforting, rain-like soundscape while he slept, had morphed from moth wings back to their original bird wings. Though Shinji had forgone being able to sense everything in his house when these new dreams had befallen him, he thought he could feel the bones in those wings when they collided up against the wall, trying to escape. More wings beat erratically underneath the floorboards, which made the thing in his heart struggle in sympathy. 

He’d thought about the possibility that it was a moth that kept trying to go to the light of Kaworu’s halo, but then he glimpsed Kaworu bandaging one of his long fingers at the table, and the halo still wasn’t there. “I’m not used to being clumsy,” Kaworu said to no one in particular. “It’s not something angels are really meant to be, after all. But it’s nothing I can’t adapt to. And I think it’s more than worth it.” 

Shinji walked over to him, trying to step lightly like he did. He didn’t attempt Kaworu’s name again; he could already feel his throat constricting at the thought. “Let me see,” he mouthed. He held his palm out so that Kaworu’s hand sat just on top of it, causing his skin to tingle. Kaworu flexed his fingers to see if the bandage stayed in place, and the spot of blood soaking through it was red. 

“Pity,” Kaworu said. “I like roses, but it looks like they’re not very fond of me.”

Shinji searched for signs of any other injuries, and he spotted a few blemishes on Kaworu’s forearm that looked like he’d been stung by some nettles. They were red, too. 

Then Kaworu, still keeping his hand elevated, leaned across the table. “Kiss it better?” he asked. 

And Shinji was both very relieved but also a tad disappointed that he’d chosen to sit at Kaworu’s side rather than across from him. 

“Thank you,” said Kaworu, and he wound the roll of bandages back up before he flickered out of sight. 

Shinji climbed into the chair that Kaworu had been occupying, thinking that it might make him feel less alone. It didn’t really. He brought his feet up onto the seat as well so that he didn’t have to feel whatever it was that was living beneath the floorboards. 

Fortunately, he didn’t have long to wait before Kaworu reappeared with a small jar in his hands — some kind of balm, from the looks of it — and began applying it to the welts on his arm. When he was finished, he placed his foot on a nearby footstool for the same treatment, and Shinji saw that the welts were also on his ankles. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Kaworu. “It’s not your fault. Like I said, this is just a little side effect.” 

Kaworu went in and out of Shinji’s vision throughout the night in little episodes like this. Usually, when he disappeared, he’d turn up in another spot of the house, and Shinji would follow him there and sit as close as he could before the field around Kaworu repelled him. The sensation of it agitated the thing in Shinji’s heart each time. In the brief intervals when Kaworu was gone, Shinji closed his eyes and tried to summon him back. He had a very specific image of Kaworu appearing before him, reaching with intangible, cupped hands into his chest, and retrieving the being inside, though his hands cradled it from Shinji’s view. 

Of course, Kaworu’s visitations never went to Shinji’s plan, though Shinji didn’t mind so much as long as he could see him. 

When he woke up, he noticed that the stain on his wall was visibly bigger.

He acclimated to the new routine within the week. The ache in his chest when he saw Kaworu became more tolerable, and in turn, Kaworu began to stay for longer periods, though still unaware of Shinji’s presence. The stain on the wall continued to spread and darken, but that didn’t unsettle Shinji nearly as much as the noise inside the walls raising its volume every night. To keep it at bay, Shinji retreated into the protective shield around Kaworu, which, though keeping Kaworu from him, appeared to extend at least a bit to him, too. 

Kaworu began to stay for hours at a time. Most of the activities in which he participated were rather mundane: maybe one night Shinji would follow him outside just to watch him gather herbs, maybe he would spend the entire time reading. When he would read, Shinji would curl up beside him, reading along with him and pretending to hold his hand. Kaworu liked love stories. 

Then one night, about two weeks in, Shinji had an epiphany. As soon as he woke, he pressed his hand to the wall and said, “Kaworu.” His voice still didn’t carry, but he continued because he was too excited. “Kaworu, I just realized something. I think I’ve found your wings.” 

Kaworu, who was kneeling on the floor and rummaging through the jars in the cabinet, didn’t respond. Shinji figured the reason Kaworu hadn’t been able to hear him all this time was that the wings had been too loud. 

 

It was cherry blossom season, and Hikari had invited Shinji to go cherry blossom viewing with her and Touji. Toward the end of their excursion, she had bestowed a basket apiece upon both Touji and Shinji as if she were knighting them and commanding them to take up a very valiant quest indeed. And maybe filling each of their baskets with flowers from the ground was a valiant quest to her; Shinji had certainly heard of a lot more problematic priorities when it came to questing. As it turned out, Hikari was looking to capitalize on the season and churn out some cherry blossom product while the supply and the hype were fresh. 

“It was nice to see you today,” said Hikari as the three of them gathered up as many fallen blossoms as they could before they left for home. 

Shinji tossed a handful of the less crushed flowers into his basket and said, “Was it really, or are you just saying that because you needed me to help out with this?” 

“No,” said Hikari, and she looked genuinely confused at the suggestion. “I mean, it definitely doesn’t hurt things to have you help out, but it was really nice to see you today.” 

Then she had to stop to yell at Touji for almost upturning his basket when he swung at a passing fly. “Sorry,” Touji said, and took up swinging in wide arcs again, but this time with his other arm. 

“That’s why he’s not allowed to handle knives in the kitchen,” Hikari said to Shinji when she made her way back over to him. “He almost took that arm off completely one time when he swatted at a mosquito and forgot he was holding the knife. Don’t get married, Shinji.” 

“Okay.” 

Hikari smiled. “I’m only joking. It’s not so bad. It’s good if you have a head start on your relationship like we did, but even if you don’t, you can learn to like each other.” 

“That’s nice, I guess,” Shinji said, doing his best to calculate on the spot how quickly one should shrug one’s shoulders to best convey maximum nonchalance. “Since I’ll probably have to pretty soon. I’m getting to be that age, and all.” 

“I actually wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you.” As she spoke, Hikari looked down to inspect the new freckles she’d acquired on her wrist now that it had gotten especially sunny. “Do you know what people say about you? I mean, you don’t seem like you’d care anyway, so I guess I should be asking if you want to know.” 

“I don’t know, _do_ I want to know?” 

“I don’t know,” Hikari mimicked, though not in a cruel kind of way. “ _Do_ you want to know?” 

“I kind of do now that you’ve brought it up.” 

“It’s nothing bad — I don’t think so, at least. You know that one time you got lost in the forest?” Hikari asked, not taking her eyes off of Touji, who was looking guiltily at her, having just tried to kill the fly by catching it between his hands. 

“Yeah.” 

“Well, there’s some people who think you might have had some kind of supernatural encounter there. There’s definitely something different about you; I’ll give them that.” 

“Thanks?” 

“And you know how some spirits, right, they can supposedly do this thing where they make you serve only them? Or like, you know how priests can’t get married cause they’re considered married to God or whatever?”

“I think so.” 

“There’s people out there who think that’s the kind of arrangement you got into with whatever you saw. They won’t ask you about it, though, I think because they don’t want to risk getting it angry or something? It’s hard to tell since the superstition changes depending on who you talk to. But it keeps them out of your hair, right? So it’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.” 

“I guess so.” 

Hikari shook the flowers in her basket up a little and stared into them like she could read a fortune in there if she tried hard enough. “Hey, you’d tell me if you actually did run into anything interesting in there, right? Maybe not now, but once we’re better friends?”

“I guess,” said Shinji.

“Ah, ‘I guess, I guess,’ ” Hikari sighed. “That’s good enough for me, I guess.” 

Back at her house, she and Shinji began to prepare a selection of the flowers for pressing.

“I think you would have a good eye for flower arranging if you ever wanted to give it a try,” she said. “It seems like you’re good at composition naturally.” 

“Thanks,” said Shinji, poking his arrangement around a bit with his pair of tweezers.

Hikari’s had taken on a winding formation across her paper, and Shinji tried not to think too much of Kaworu and the violet borders of his territory when he saw it. “You don’t like it?” Hikari asked when she caught him staring. 

“No,” Shinji said, snapping to attention, “I do. I was just thinking that it’s something I wouldn’t have thought of myself.”

“Nice save.” Hikari laid a few loose petals from her basket to the ends for some extra flourish, and she cursed when her tweezers accidentally tore through one of them. “Excuse my language. And I decided on this because ‘curved is the line of beauty,’ ” she recited. “Right Touji?” She’d said the same thing to him earlier, when she’d been instructing him on how best to arrange the cherry blossoms in her hair. He was surprisingly good at braiding hair; Hikari said it was because her two younger sisters had once given him a how-to book for myriad braided styles to try on them. 

“Now he can do fancy stuff with ribbons and everything. It used to be he didn’t even know how to do their pigtails,” Hikari had snickered. “He’d make them all uneven; one of them would be way up here.” She gestured to the top of her head. 

“Hey, everyone thought it was cute,” Touji had said. 

“And now they think it’s cute for the right reasons,” Hikari had replied. “It’s the learning experience that’s important.” 

Looking at her hairstyle now, Shinji had to agree. “So,” he said. “‘Curved is the line of beauty’ — who came up with that, anyway?” 

“Oh, some artist guy I knew used to say it all the time,” said Hikari. 

Touji yelled from the other room, “Wasn’t that the guy you used to date before me?” 

“Yeah, and he was awful,” Hikari shouted back. To Shinji, she said at a normal volume, “He kept trying to talk to me about all the different shades of black. But, you never know; there’s someone out there for everyone. Maybe he’s found someone who’s into that now. They’re probably just not very fun.” 

“Not like you, right?”

“Absolutely not like me. That looks fine, right?” She backed away from her handiwork to get a better look at the composition. “Somebody would hang that on their wall, right?” 

Shinji looked it over. “I would,” he said. 

“Me too,” said Touji’s voice.

“You weren’t even watching,” said Hikari. 

“So?” 

“I think it’s nice that you have a fan,” Shinji said while Hikari, mock-indignant at her failure to find more constructive feedback, laid another sheet of paper over her flowers so she could begin pressing. 

“It does have its perks,” Hikari admitted. She picked a book from the stack she’d brought nearby and tucked the flowers into the middle. “I’m good,” she said when Shinji tried to help her heave the weights on top of them.“I don’t like it when people think I have Touji do it for me, and I don’t plan on lying about it when I tell them no.” 

“Remember not to lift with your back,” Touji said. 

“Yeah, yeah.” She turned to Shinji. “He tells me that every time.” 

 

Shinji wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he left out the little dish of candied cherry blossoms he’d made for Kaworu; Kaworu wasn’t an animal, after all. Still, though, he’d even gone through the pain of making a extra batch when he’d realized Kaworu probably wouldn’t like as much sugar on his, what with not having eaten in so long and all that. He quelled the hunger pangs of disappointment by nibbling on the untouched cherry blossoms throughout the day.

 

He had less than a week left, and Kaworu hadn’t given him any clues in his dreams. So even though he would miss seeing Kaworu terribly that night, he forced himself to stay awake so that he could travel to a small lake that was within walking distance. He’d been here before. 

For some time, he didn’t do anything but settle himself onto the pier and stare up at the moon. He let his vision go hazy, because he’d conjectured that doing so might reveal something to him in the shadows on the moon’s surface. No result. He wished that he had a telescope. He also wished that the suspicions he’d harbored about what he needed to do here wouldn’t turn out to be true, but now that wasn’t looking likely. 

Sighing, he slipped off the pier into the water. 

He continued to exhale in one long stream as he sank down, watching the moonlight strike the air bubbles that floated upward to make miniature moons out of them. He held his hand up to the fading light, too, but his skin wasn’t anything like Kaworu’s, and it didn’t glow like his. He was starting to feel dizzy, but then again, he was accustomed to feeling dizzy these days. 

He remembered feeling that way when Kaworu had placed that first spell on him, wrapped his arms around him and said, “Ikari Shinji.” 

“Ikari Shinji,” said a familiar voice, not Kaworu’s, but with the same accent that Kaworu had. 

His lack of breath suddenly didn’t bother him anymore, and arms that were invisible in the black water wrapped him up in warmth. 

“It’s good to see you again,” the voice said. “I nearly thought you’d abandoned what we started. I must say, we were a bit disappointed in you. Why did you make him wait for so long? You must have known when you found him. You very nearly broke his heart before he even knew you.” 

Shinji couldn’t answer because it seemed the thing in his heart didn’t want him talking to any angels, Kaworu or otherwise. 

The angel must have noticed. “At any rate, it appears you’ve paid for it enough. I can tell that there’s room in your heart for him now.” It placed one of its hands over Shinji’s heart and drew out the parasite inside, setting it free and sending it back up to heaven in one of the bubbles of Shinji’s breath. 

“Don’t do that to him again,” said the angel before it let Shinji go. “Even if you love him only a fraction of the way that I know he must adore you, that will be enough for him.” 

Shinji didn’t remember swimming back to the surface; he just remembered a vision of Kaworu carrying him out of the water. When Kaworu set Shinji down on dry land, he knelt beside him and said something Shinji couldn’t hear for the water in his ears. He caught the tail end of it, which was Kaworu saying “… with all my love,” before he kissed Shinji’s forehead, and Shinji woke up at home. 

 

The night Shinji was set to meet Kaworu again, before he woke up in Kaworu’s forest, he dreamed that he was standing with both his hands and his cheek pressed against the wall with the stain on it. “Kaworu,” he said, his voice returned to him, “I’m going to pull you out of the wall today.” Then he pushed through the softened plaster, found Kaworu’s hand inside, and did so. 

Kaworu couldn’t communicate with his siblings anymore, so he must have felt something in the air, because he was ready when Shinji ran into his arms and said, “Tabris, I’ve missed you so much.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun" by Emily Brontë.


	8. Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “After I’d met you, somebody told me one day that I looked like I was in love, and I told her that I wasn’t.” He dropped his head to burrow it it into Kaworu’s shoulder. “But I was lying."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't quite the most self-indulgent, sickeningly romantic thing I've ever written; that honor still belongs to et Anima. But writing and reading this over took me back to the embarrassment I felt writing that fic.  
> It's a bit of a shorter chapter, but I think there's a lot of Meaningful Content in it.

It had rained shortly before their meeting, and the empty rainclouds, not having vanished quite yet, veiled the two of them from the watchful moon. A dusting of mist covered the forest floor to resemble the lunar dust of which Kaworu had spoken, and Shinji kicked it up into small clouds when he ran to Kaworu. The mist also carpeted the river of violets, so Shinji thought nothing of crossing it. In that space they’d managed to reserve for themselves, even the Earth’s gravity seemed lighter, because Kaworu had no problem catching Shinji and lifting him off the ground. 

“I knew I was right to believe in you,” he said, pressing their foreheads together. Shinji wrapped his arms even more tightly around Kaworu’s shoulders and pressed back, reveling in the absence of the electricity on Kaworu’s skin from his dreams. 

“I feel like you’re more… I don’t know, substantial now?” Shinji said when Kaworu set him down and he managed to get a good look at him. He looked healthier, for a spirit, anyway. 

“Am I?” Kaworu asked. His smile showed no signs of being forced. “Although now that I think of it, I have had more reason to be present lately, haven’t I?” 

“Maybe,” Shinji said, mostly because he didn’t know what else to say. He stared at the circle of Kaworu’s halo, thinking he could will it away, because then Kaworu’s heart could beat freely, and his blood would turn red like Shinji’s. “It could also be that I’m not used to it because you always disappear in my dreams.” 

“Those again?” 

Shinji nodded. “Nearly every night,” he said.

Shinji couldn’t be sure, but Kaworu seemed like he knew the “nearly” was an unnecessary addition. “Still nothing indecent?” he asked, leaning forward to rub his forehead against Shinji’s again. 

“Of course,” said Shinji. 

“Of course.” Kaworu shut his eyes, which made his eyelashes brush against Shinji’s skin. “So this time, am I allowed to know the not-indecent things I’m doing in your house nearly every night?” 

“Lots of not-indecent things,” Shinji said. Then, maybe because the idea of being in an angel’s presence had finally begun to sink in with him, he felt an overwhelming need to confess a few things. “I really wanted you to stay with me. I took your violets and sewed them into my clothes; did you know that?” 

Kaworu pulled back. “No, I didn’t.” 

A familiar mixture of relief laced with disappointment washed through his veins when he found out that Kaworu hadn’t known, and it was strong enough to wash out any embarrassment this confession had extruded. It took him back to the feeling he’d had when Kaworu asked the invisible someone in his dream to kiss his injury better. 

“Is it alright with you if I hold your hand?” he asked Kaworu.

“By all means,” Kaworu said, extending his left hand for Shinji to see. 

Shinji rested Kaworu’s hand atop his palm the same way that one might rest their hand upon the fragile surface tension on the surface of bathwater. After a few seconds, he broke through it to bring Kaworu’s hand up for inspection, trying to find the heart line. He wasn’t even sure if the one he chose to focus on was the heart line, anyway — he’d ask Hikari about it later; she seemed like she might know — but he focused on that one because it looked the longest. He followed the stream of it up the side of Kaworu’s hand and into his long fingers. 

“You really don’t have any memories of being in my house when we’re apart?” 

“I’m sorry,” said Kaworu. 

“No, I’m the one who should be sorry,” said Shinji. “It’s not like you did anything wrong. I was just assuming things.” 

“Well…” said Kaworu, “you could still describe things to me, and maybe that will trigger my memory.” 

Shinji nodded. 

“So what’s this about you sewing my violets into your clothes?” Kaworu turned his hand over so that he could grasp Shinji’s wrist and feel the makeshift sachet of his sleeve. “Did they give you the hint you were looking for?” 

“I’d hoped so, but no,” said Shinji. He looked at the blue veins in Kaworu’s wrist, then covered them when he curled his fingers around Kaworu’s wrist in return. “I tried to find your name everywhere; I’d look to see if there was anything to the way the flowers in my garden grew, or if I could read anything spelled out in the stars. Did you know… Well, I guess you didn’t, but I used to have this delusion that if I watched them long enough, I could make somebody to send to you by connecting the stars together. It was pretty arrogant of me, now that I think about it.” 

Kaworu pushed his thumb under the hem of Shinji’s sleeve so that he could feel Shinji’s pulse. When he looked downward, it was possible for Shinji to make out the sweep of his lashes.

“For a long time, I could hear you walking around my house, and I could feel it too, if that makes sense,” Shinji continued. It seemed now that the parasite had been taken out of his chest, his heart couldn’t stop spilling things out. “Like this —” he lifted his hand and made as if to run his thumb beneath Kaworu’s lashes in the moment after he’d blinked. “— I could feel that through the air. After I sewed the violets in, I started to see you instead of just hear you, and I saw you more often, but I couldn’t talk to you because there was something in here that would stop me every time I tried.” He pointed to his heart with his free hand. “But I could hear you talking to somebody. I wanted so badly for it to be me. You never did mention a name, though.” 

Overhead, there was a brief break in the clouds that allowed a few stars to peek through, as if to bear witness to Shinji’s testimony.

“And in my dreams, you had red blood instead of blue, and your halo was missing, but I couldn’t touch you.” Shinji gripped Kaworu’s wrist a little more tightly, just to be sure that the film of static he’d felt on Kaworu’s skin before hadn’t reemerged. “Now I can touch you, but you have your halo again.” 

Kaworu slid his hand back along Shinji’s wrist so that he could lace their fingers together. He held out his right hand so that they could replicate it on that side, and Shinji let him. 

“Did you want to touch me?” he asked. 

Both of them kept their eyes trained on their joined hands. 

“A little,” Shinji said. 

Kaworu nodded. “What happened when you tried?” 

“I’m not sure how to explain it. There was this… aura around your skin that kept me from making contact every time I tried.” 

“Was it the same thing that kept us apart when you tried to speak to me?” 

“I don’t think so,” Shinji said. “Maybe they’re related, though.” 

“Perhaps,” Kaworu said. “But I’m afraid I must apologize once more. I think that if I could recall anything, that would be it. I’m sorry.” 

Shinji shivered.

“Are you cold?” 

Shinji shook his head. “No. What about you? Are you cold?” 

“Not so much anymore,” Kaworu said. “Maybe I should make you another garland just in case, though.” 

“No,” said Shinji, locking his fingers around Kaworu to keep them from retreating. “Keep holding my hands.”

“Are you sure?” Kaworu asked.

“Yes,” said Shinji. “In my dreams I’ve only ever been able to pretend.” 

“Very well,” said Kaworu, tightening his fingers around Shinji’s as well to reassure him. He gave a small laugh. “And here I thought I was supposed to be the one confessing things tonight.” 

“I really missed you,” said Shinji. 

“Did you?” Kaworu asked playfully. “It sounds to me like I must have been there the whole time.” 

“But it doesn’t sound like that to _me_ , from what you’re telling me,” said Shinji. He took the initiative to bring his gaze back up, and Kaworu followed suit so that they could look one another in the eyes. “What do you see when we’re apart, anyway?” 

“Not much of anything,” said Kaworu. 

Shinji searched his eyes for any signs of deceit, and he couldn’t find anything, but then again, maybe angels had an entirely different body language altogether. 

“Remember?” said Kaworu. “I’m not here when the full moon isn’t.” 

“Maybe you’re just not conscious?” said Shinji. 

Kaworu’s eyes widened very slightly. “You really want me to be there with you.” 

“I do,” said Shinji. 

Kaworu’s eyes flickered to Shinji’s sleeve once more, and Shinji looked down to see that the violets inside were glowing through the fabric. “I really want to be there, too,” said Kaworu. “I feel as though I’ve missed you ever since I met you, and I feel as though I’d missed you even before that.” 

“And even when I’m here?” asked Shinji.

Kaworu unlaced his fingers from Shinji’s, although they never lost contact as he slipped his hand down Shinji’s wrist again to pluck out a fresh violet that had just sprouted out of Shinji’s sleeve. “Yes,” he said, placing it in Shinji’s palm. “You’ll recall that I’m selfish.” 

The two of them watched the petals of the violet curl inward one by one, until Shinji found himself cupping a miniature replica of a rosebud. Had there been more light, they would have been able to see that it was now red in color. 

“Do you remember that night when I asked if I loved you?” said Kaworu.

“Yes.” 

“I think about that a lot.” 

“So do I,” said Shinji. 

Kaworu picked up the rosebud between his nails, careful neither to bruise the flower nor scrape his nails across Shinji’s palm. Shinji recognized the motion from the way Kaworu would pick stray lavender buds off of his floor. 

“And since I think about it so much,” said Kaworu, placing the flower in the familiar spot in Shinji’s lapel, where it fit neatly, “I know what my answer is now.” 

“What is it?” asked Shinji. 

“I think you know, too.” 

“I know what I want it to be.” 

The rosebud bloomed and Shinji nearly cried when Kaworu said, “I love you, Ikari Shinji. I really do.” 

Shinji wrapped his arms around Kaworu’s neck and pressed his cheek against Kaworu’s. He was careful not to crush the new flower between them. “Is this alright?” he asked. 

Kaworu circled his arms around Shinji’s waist. “I think that you will always be alright with me,” he said.

“Because I have to tell you something else.” 

“Anything,” Kaworu whispered.

With his arms wrapped around Kaworu like this, Shinji could see a few more violets growing out of his seams. “After I’d met you, somebody told me one day that I looked like I was in love, and I told her that I wasn’t.” He dropped his head to burrow it it into Kaworu’s shoulder. “But I was lying. I was already in love with you.” 

“But did you know that then?” 

“No. I didn’t until just recently.” 

“Well,” Kaworu laughed, turning his head so that his lips were brushing against Shinji’s hair. “Better late than never.” 

Shinji hummed his assent. “And there’s one more thing,” he said.

“What is it?” Kaworu asked. He brought one of his hands up to run through Shinji’s hair. Now, Shinji wouldn’t have been afraid to say that he liked it.

“You actually did talk to me in my dreams once, on the night that I realized I was in love with you.” 

“Did I say anything interesting?” 

“I actually couldn’t make it out,” Shinji said. He held Kaworu tighter. “I only know that the last thing you did before I woke up was that you kissed my forehead.” 

Kaworu coaxed Shinji’s arms from around his neck, and then he held Shinji by the shoulders to look at him. “Is that your way of telling me to make that dream come true?” 

“I think you know the answer.” 

“One day,” Kaworu said, “I hope that you’ll be able to ask for what you want without worrying.” But he leaned down and did as Shinji had implicitly asked anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come a-kawoshinning with me, either at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for tea and kawoshins, or at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/) for nothing of particular merit.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Sonnets from the Portuguese 44: Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.


End file.
